Leipzig Glossing Rules

Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses

About the rules

The Leipzig Glossing Rules have been developed jointly by the Department of
Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
(Bernard Comrie, Martin Haspelmath) and by the Department of Linguistics
of the University of Leipzig (Balthasar Bickel). They consist of ten rules for the
"syntax" and "semantics" of interlinear glosses, and an appendix with a
proposed "lexicon" of abbreviated category labels. The rules cover a large part
of linguists' needs in glossing texts, but most authors will feel the need to add
(or modify) certain conventions (especially category labels). Still, it will be
useful to have a standard set of conventions that linguists can refer to, and the
Leipzig Rules are proposed as such to the community of linguists. The Rules
are intended to reflect common usage, and only very few (mostly optional)
innovations are proposed.

We intend to update the Leipzig Glossing Rules occasionally, so feedback is
highly welcome.

Leipzig, last change: May 31, 2015
Further updates will be managed by the Committee of Editors of Linguistics Journals.

The rules

(revised version of February 2008)

Preamble

Interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses give information about the
meanings and grammatical properties of individual words and parts of
words. Linguists by and large conform to certain notational conventions in
glossing, and the main purpose of this document is to make the most widely
used conventions explicit.

Depending on the author's purposes and the readers' assumed background
knowledge, different degrees of detail will be chosen. The current rules
therefore allow some flexibility in various respects, and sometimes alternative
options are mentioned.

The main purpose that is assumed here is the presentation of an example in a
research paper or book. When an entire corpus is tagged, somewhat different
considerations may apply (e.g. one may want to add information about larger
units such as words or phrases; the rules here only allow for information
about morphemes).

It should also be noted that there are often multiple ways of analyzing the
morphological patterns of a language. The glossing conventions do not help
linguists in deciding between them, but merely provide standard ways of
abbreviating possible descriptions. Moreover, glossing is rarely a complete
morphological description, and it should be kept in mind that its purpose is
not to state an analysis, but to give some further possibly relevant information
on the structure of a text or an example, beyond the idiomatic translation.

A remark on the treatment of glosses in data cited from other sources: Glosses
are part of the analysis, not part of the data. When citing an example from a
published source, the gloss may be changed by the author if they prefer
different terminology, a different style or a different analysis.

Rule 1: Word-by-word alignment

Interlinear glosses are left-aligned vertically, word by word, with the example. E.g.

Segmentable morphemes are separated by hyphens, both in the example and
in the gloss. There must be exactly the same number of hyphens in the
example and in the gloss. E.g.

(2) Lezgian (Haspelmath 1993:207)

Gila

abur-u-n

ferma

hamišaluǧ

güǧüna

amuq’-da-č.

now

they-OBL-GEN

farm

forever

behind

stay-FUT-NEG

‘Now their farm will not stay behind forever.’

Since hyphens and vertical alignment make the text look unusual, authors
may want to add another line at the beginning, containing the unmodified
text, or resort to the option described in Rule 4 (and especially 4C).
Clitic boundaries are marked by an equals sign, both in the object
language and in the gloss.

(3) West Greenlandic (Fortescue 1984:127)

palasi=lu

niuirtur=lu

priest=and

shopkeeper=and

'both the priest and the shopkeeper'

Rule 2A. (Optional)
If morphologically bound elements constitute distinct prosodic or
phonological words, a hyphen and a single space may be used together in the
object language (but not in the gloss).

(4) Hakha Lai

a-nii -láay

3SG-laugh-FUT

's/he will laugh'

Rule 3: Grammatical category labels

Grammatical morphemes are generally rendered by abbreviated grammatical
category labels, printed in upper case letters (usually small capitals). A list of
standard abbreviations (which are widely known among linguists) is given at
the end of this document.

Deviations from these standard abbreviations may of course be necessary
in particular cases, e.g. if a category is highly frequent in a language, so that a
shorter abbreviation is more convenient, e.g. CPL (instead of COMPL) for
"completive", PF (instead of PRF) for "perfect", etc. If a category is very rare, it
may be simplest not to abbreviate its label at all.

In many cases, either a category label or a word from the metalanguage is
acceptable. Thus, both of

(5) Russian

My

s

Marko

poexa-l-i

avtobus-om

v

Peredelkino.

1PL

COM

Marko

go-PST-PL

bus-INS

All

Peredelkino.

we

with

Marko

go-PST-PL

bus-by

to

Peredelkino.

'Marko and I went to Perdelkino by bus.'

Rule 4: One-to-many correspondences

When a single object-language element is rendered by several metalanguage
elements (words or abbreviations), these are separated by periods. E.g.

(6) Turkish

çık-mak

come.out-INF

'to come out'

(7) Latin

insul-arum

island-GEN.PL

'of the islands'

(8) French

aux

chevaux

to.ART.PL

horse.PL

'to the horses'

(9) German

unser-n

Väter-n

our-DAT.PL

father.PL-DAT.PL

'to our fathers'

(10) Hittite (Lehmann 1982:211)

n=an

apedani

mehuni

essandu.

CONN=him

that.DAT.SG

time.DAT.SG

eat.they.shall

'They shall celebrate him on that date.' (CONN = connective)

(11) Jaminjung (Schultze-Berndt 2000:92)

nanggayan

guny-bi-yarluga?

who

2DU.A.3SG.P-FUT-poke

'Who do you two want to spear?'

The ordering of the two metalanguage elements may be determined by
various principles that are not easy to generalize over, so no rule will be
provided for this.

There are various reasons for a one-to-many correspondence between
object-language elements and gloss elements. These are conflated by the
uniform use of the period. If one wants to distinguish between them, one may
follow Rules 4A-E.

If an object-language element is neither formally nor semantically segmentable and only the metalanguage happens to lack a single-word equivalent, the underscore may be used instead of the period.

(12) Turkish (cf. 6)

çık-mak

come_out-INF

'to come out'

Rule 4B. (Optional)

If an object-language element is formally unsegmentable but has two clearly distinguishable meanings or grammatical properties, the semi-colon may be used. E.g.

(13) Latin (cf. 7)

insul-arum

island-GEN;PL

'of the islands'

(14) French

aux

chevaux

to;ART;PL

horse;PL

'to the horses'

Rule 4C. (Optional)

If an object-language element is formally and semantically segmentable, but the author does not want to show the formal segmentation (because it is irrelevant and/or to keep the text intact), the colon may be used. E.g.

(15) Hittite (Lehmann 1982:211) (cf. 10)

n=an

apedani

mehuni

essandu.

CONN=him

that:DAT;SG

time:DAT;SG

eat:they:shall

'They shall celebrate him on that date.'

Rule 4D. (Optional)

If a grammatical property in the object-language is signaled by a
morphophonological change (ablaut, mutation, tone alternation, etc.), the
backslash is used to separate the category label and the rest of the gloss.

(16) German (cf. 9)

unser-n

Väter-n

our-DAT.PL

father.PL-DAT.PL

'to our fathers' (cf. singular Vater)

(17) Irish

bhris-is

PST\break-2SG

'you broke' (cf. nonpast bris-)

(18) Kinyarwanda

mú-kòrà

SBJV\1PL-work

'that we work' (cf. indicative mù-kòrà)

Rule 4E. (Optional)

If a language has person-number affixes that express the agent-like and the
patient-like argument of a transitive verb simultaneously, the symbol ">" may
be used in the gloss to indicate that the first is the agent-like argument and the
second is the patient-like argument.

Person and number are not separated by a period when they occur in this order. E.g.

(20) Italian

and-iamo

go-PRS.1PL (not: go-PRS.1.PL)

'we go'

Rule 5A. (Optional)

Number and gender markers are very frequent in some languages, especially
when combined with person. Several authors therefore use non-capitalized
shortened abbreviations without a period. If this option is adopted, then the
second gloss is used in (21).

(21) Belhare

ne-e

a-khim-chi

n-yuNNa

DEM-LOC

that.DAT.SG

3NSG-be.NPST

DEM-LOC

1sPOSS-house-PL

3ns-be.NPST

'Here are my houses.''

Rule 6: Non-overt elements

If the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss contains an element that does not
correspond to an overt element in the example, it can be enclosed in square
brackets. An obvious alternative is to include an overt "Ø" in the objectlanguage
text, which is separated by a hyphen like an overt element.

Grammatical or lexical elements that consist of two parts which are treated as
distinct morphological entities (e.g. bipartite stems such as Lakhota na-xʔu̧ 'hear') may be treated in two different ways:

(i) The gloss may simply be repeated:

(24) Lakhota

na-wíčha-wa-xʔu̧

hear-3PL.UND-1SG.ACT-hear

'I hear them' (UND = undergoer, ACT = actor)

(i) The gloss may simply be repeated:

(25) Lakhota

na-wíčha-wa-xʔu̧

hear-3PL.UND-1SG.ACT- STEM

'I hear them'

Circumfixes are "bipartite affixes" and can be treated in the same way, e.g.

(26) German

ge-seh-en

or:

ge-seh-en

PTCP-see-PTCP

PTCP-see-CIRC

'seen'

'seen'

Rule 9: Infixes

Infixes are enclosed by angle brackets, and so is the object-language
counterpart in the gloss.

(27) Tagalog

b<um>ili (stem: bili)

<ACTFOC>buy

'buy'

(28) Latin

reli<n>qu-ere (stem: reliqu-)

leave<PRS>-INF

'to leave'

Infixes are generally easily identifiable as left-peripheral (as in 27) or as rightperipheral (as in 28), and this determines the position of the gloss
corresponding to the infix with respect to the gloss of the stem. If the infix is
not clearly peripheral, some other basis for linearizing the gloss has to be
found.